Residents near Andrews nuclear dump receive health survey

Residents living near a low-level radioactive waste burial ground near Andrews will be asked to complete a health survey as part of a study commissioned by state officials.

State environmental and health officials have hired the University of North Texas to assess about 24,000 people who live within a 35-mile radius of Waste Control Specialists LLC's nuclear dump site in Andrews County near the New Mexico border.

University spokeswoman Leslie Wimmer said letters encouraging residents in Texas and in New Mexico to participate will go out in the next few days.

The survey, authorized in legislation in 2003, will provide a baseline health assessment before radioactive material is buried at the site later this year. Neither the questions nor the results will be made public, Wimmer said.

"The health survey is an appropriate safety precaution to take," Waste Control spokesman Chuck McDonald said Friday. "I think it's another example of the prudent approach the state has taken throughout this process."

Lawmakers agreed this year to let 36 other states to dispose of their low-level radioactive waste at the site. Previously, only the federal government, Texas and Vermont were authorized to dispose of radioactive waste there.

No radioactive was is currently at the site. The waste that will be buried there includes workers' clothing, glass, metal and other materials now stored at nuclear power plants, hospitals, universities and research labs.

Environmentalists are concerned about the possible contamination of groundwater sources that lie 150 feet from the dump and close to the nation's largest aquifer. A recent report by Public Citizen Texas says contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer would be devastating both economically and environmentally.

The survey, which residents can do over the phone or online, is a good start, said Tom "Smitty" Smith of the environmental group Public Citizen.

"The devil's in the details and the quality of the survey will be determined in its usefulness over time, both in terms of what's considered in the baseline but also in how the residents are tracked because most of us move several times in our lifetime," he said. "You often live someplace else when the cancer shows up."

The survey was put together by the university's Survey Research Center, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Department of State Health Services.

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However, the survey should be more wide-spread than a 35-mile radius. Our storm clouds yesterday built up in the southwest. I don't know if they reached to the Andrews area, but they very well could have. That means the rain that fell on the Lubbock area and even around Snyder were a part of those cells. Just imagine how widespread that contamination would be if there had been a human error that cause even minimal contamination around the WCS dump.

What is frightening to me is that once contamination of whatever kind (hazardous, radioactive, whatever) is spread over our farm land, the entire area could be devastated. How would one clean up such contamination once it's done?

I say put ALL profits/proceeds from the burial of contaminated material into a permanent escrow fund for possible future health problems or contamination of farm land. NO individual should be allowed to pocket profits from a dump that could affect the entire state and even adjacent states. This hazardous waste dump should concern the entire state of Texas since tax payers will own it -- upkeep, repairs, oversight, the whole package -- once it is full.

A thirty-five mile radius is a dangerous joke. Skeptics should read the history of the nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok, where the radioactive detritus was spread for a hundreds miles across the Pacific.

The wind patterns of the whole world are an interlocked, integrated system. There can be no such thing as a "contained" radioactive contamination. The Andrews dump will work just fine until there is one (1) slip up. Then we will all pay the price, over an appallingly wide area.